Bill Barr: Mob Rule and Moral Bankruptcy at Columbia

Reading the report issued last month by Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism, one could be forgiven for thinking that it describes the University of Heidelberg circa 1933. It contains accounts of observant Jews being harassed and assaulted, and open calls for the murder of Jews. But no, this is not Nazi Germany. This is the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2024. There—in one of the nation’s most elite enclaves of higher learning—the oldest hatred is alive and well, gussied up in academic robes. 

The admittedly “serious and pervasive” antisemitic incidents detailed by the report are disturbing. Even more troubling is the extent to which Columbia faculty and administrators were complicit in the problem. One instructor kicked off a class in the Master of Public Health program with a discussion of the Jewish “capitalists” who “laundered” their “dirty money” and “blood money” through donations to the university. Others silenced Jewish students in class discussions of the Holocaust and Israel. Still others moved class sessions and office hours to Columbia’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” where Jewish students were routinely threatened and physically attacked.

For their part, campus demonstrators made no attempt to conceal their hatred of Jews. In fact, they made a public spectacle of it. A video cited by the report shows demonstrators stealing an Israeli flag from a Jewish student and assaulting him as he tried to stop them from setting it on fire. It shows demonstrators repeatedly shouting “Go back to Poland” at Jewish students as they walked across campus. One leader of the encampment proudly boasted, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists. . . I feel very comfortable calling for those people to die.” Still, the same university that offers hours of training on “microaggressions” refused to acknowledge decidedly macro-aggressive attacks on Jews. 

While all this was happening, administrators either minimized or denied the problem. One member of the Office of Diversity told a student that if the antisemitic incidents she observed made her feel unsafe, she should leave campus. Another administrator told individual students that they were the “only student” who had complained about antisemitism before referring each for mental health counseling.

The gaslighting is astonishing. Moreover, the report’s key recommendation—more training on what constitutes antisemitism—misses the point.

Antisemitism isn’t borne of ignorance at Columbia. Antisemitism is taught at Columbia. Discrimination—now reconceptualized as “intersectionality”—has become the ideological touchstone of the university. It is the subject of training programs, celebrated in academic centers, studied in labs, and baked into departmental mission statements. Under this theory, the world is divided into oppressor and victim classes based on racial, ethnic, and gender identity. And in this system of power and subordination, Jews are the ultimate oppressors. As one Columbia student leader put it, “white Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people.”

So the problem is not, as the report suggests, an “absence of clarity” about what constitutes antisemitism. It’s that antisemitism now lies at the ideological heart of the university, smuggled in through postmodern critical theory. It has been nurtured in faculty lounges and classrooms for decades. Now it is on public display for the entire world to see. 

This hatred is a danger to all members of the Columbia community, as it will not—and has not—stopped with Jews.  

In April, an angry mob consisting primarily of Columbia students, alumni, and even faculty, overran the university’s historic Hamilton Hall in the name of “intifada.” Four janitors were working in the building at the time, cleaning up after students and faculty. The rioters held two of the men, one African American and the other Latino, against their will and physically assaulted them. (My law firm represents the two workers.) 

All of this darkly mirrors the violent convulsions that wracked Columbia during the late 1960s, when I was an undergraduate there. Then, as I recount in my recent memoir, it was Students for a Democratic Society that was calling for a revolution. Mainly white and affluent, the demonstrators seemed to have done pretty well for themselves under the existing democratic system. But what they lacked in intellectual coherence, they more than made up for in violent zeal. They took over buildings, rioted, and provoked violent confrontations with the police, all while campus administrators, with a few notable exceptions, remained supine.

By the time the university was forced to take action against the rioters, it was too late. The message had been sent. Moderates, conservatives, and the politically undecided chose to pursue their education elsewhere. Radicals and revolutionaries were welcome on the Columbia faculty. And the very mission of the university changed from the pursuit of truth and knowledge to activism and social transformation.

The antisemitism that is convulsing Columbia is the consummation of the ideological drift and mission creep that began at the university in the 1960s. What was initially a crude cry for revolution in the riots of 1968 now finds expression in the academic jargon of intersectionality. But violence is the inevitable end of a theory that views our democratic institutions as systems of subordination. And antisemitism is the impulse that is unleashed by the intersectional taxonomy of oppressors and victims. 

It will take more than a cleanup crew to remove the stain of antisemitism at Columbia. It will take principled leaders with moral courage and ramrod spines, both of which seem to be in short supply. In the absence of those leaders, the victims of discrimination will have to rely on our legal and judicial institutions to protect the civil rights that Columbia University has once again surrendered to a baying mob.

William P. Barr served as U.S. attorney general under President George H.W. Bush (1991–1993) and again under President Donald Trump (2019–2020). He is the author of One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General.